How to take a genre and write against it from the inside. He wasn't the first or the only one, of course, but what an example Lolita is! Humbert Humbert’s moral code is basically the same as Henry Miller’s, only Miller would have given his prepuce to write as well as Humbert does; and after the ritual apologies he would have gone on to write his fable of individualism through sexual transgression without it ever occuring to him that something was wrong with it.

Approaching Zero was an anti-Orientalist novel inside an Orientalist novel. Almost nobody who read it understood that; they couldn’t see why I was serving up their Orientalism with these sour side dishes. Right now I’m trying to write an anti-apocalyptic novel inside an apocalyptic novel. Is there something belated in this kind of gesture, as so much of modernism can seem belated in its inventory of techniques that have outlasted their world? With modernism pushing 100, the question seems all the more pertinent, and I don’t have a ready answer. What I do know is that I’m hardly alone in preferring the morality of fissures to the morality of systems. And that this stance is nothing new.

I will either have gotten an academic job or abandoned the search. I will have finished a dissertation, The Coffin Texts, the untitled novel whose 1500-word beginning is on the hard drive. I will turn thirty-three. So it will not be too late to change everything, if everything needs to change.

But I should write about life as it is. But its fibers are too near, and in the moments of reflection I want only to dodge them. For your sake I wish this were something else; but these days I make everything in secret, and I can’t tell you whether it’s good enough.

Administered a midterm exam, handed back graded papers, so have the weekend to fasten a few more bricks into the wall that will keep out the rising sea. And everyone evaluating themselves loudly in public, themselves and their peers

That’s the thing about fortifications: you hate to see other people building them. From the outside it always looks petty and hateful. Why can’t you breathe our common air?

"You remember how at the end of 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' the narrator is creeping in circles around the room? Right. So I think it was Walter Benn Michaels who argued that this was an example of economic circulation, in the capitalist world-system in which we’re all inscribed, or something.”

I'm trying to take the formal constraints of "publishable in the United States" and work within them, the way people enjoy working within the constraints of the villanelle or whatever. Only my idea of "publishable" appears to be consistently my own. Some interview with Stephen Malkmus about the songs he picked for singles of Wowee Zowee!”Yeah, I’d been smoking a lot of grass, and they sounded like hits.”

all of which leads to the death-cells
each in the name of its god
or longevity because as says Aristotle
philosophy is not for young men
their Katholou can not be sufficiently derived from their hekasta
their generalities cannot be born from a sufficient phalanx of particulars

So I looked up:

A further proof of what has been said is, that although the young may be
experts in geometry and mathematics and similar branches of knowledge, we do not consider that a young man can have Prudence. The reason is that Prudence includes a knowledge of particular facts, and this is derived from experience, which a young man does not a possess; for experience is the fruit of years. One might indeed further enquire why it is that, though a boy may be a mathematician, he cannot be a metaphysician or a natural philosopher. Perhaps the answer is that Mathematics deals with abstractions, whereas the first principles of Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy are derived from experience: the young can only repeat them without conviction of their truth, whereas the formal concepts of Mathematics are easily understood.

Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.